Catharsis

I’m going to write about home. It’ll make me feel better, and I need to feel better. I’m not going to get it right, though, how I really feel. The English language is failing me, and this is one of those times that I wish I had three or four or eight other languages at my disposal, the better to express myself.

Homesickness is like the grief of losing a loved one. There’s a feeling that you’re so far away from the place you love that you’ll never see it again. And how will life go on if you know that you’re never going to go home again? Now, logically speaking, I know I’ll go to Maine again. I’ll get off a plane somewhere nearby (I tend to fly into New Hampshire since airfares are cheaper than flying into Portland), get a rental car, and make The Drive. The one that always gets my heart singing and my tears welling because my insides are bursting to be homehomehome. And some day, SOME DAY, I won’t have to get back on another plane a week later or two weeks later or EVER AGAIN later, because I will be home to stay.

My God, how it makes my heart thump to think of going home to STAY. It’s a special kind of hell for a country girl craving greenery and proximity to the ocean to be stuck living in the baked asphalt nightmare that is Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve imagined it… imagined how Calvin and I would leave here with our belongings packed in a moving truck, making the opposite and complementary drive to the one I took nearly fifteen-holy-fuck-years ago.

HOW on Earth has it been that I’ve lived here for fifteen years? I could leave Arizona behind and not look back and not regret it for a single second. Within weeks of living back in Maine I suspect it would start to feel like I had just been on a very long, very unusual vacation. Calvin can be considered the very best of souvenirs. Heh.

There’s a hell of a lot of “Old Money” around in Maine – rich old families whose ancestors go back to the original founding colonists, that own thousands of acres of land and mansions with huge footprints and old architecture. There are coastal tourist villages with multi-million dollar spas and B&B’s and hunting lodges and every other amenity you’d ever want, with some more besides. There’s gourmet restaurants with, of course, the best seafood you’ll ever have pass your lips. There’s specialty shops of handcrafted wares and artwork galleries. There’s several rather advanced ski resorts that are starting to (if they haven’t already – it’s been years since I’ve been) rival Vermont’s much ballyhooed facilities. There’s even a handful of fairly sophisticated night clubs in Portland, if you’re looking for that kind of thing. Vacationing in Maine does NOT have to be the rustic experience that the thought conjures – though of course, the outdoors and natural living is a big draw (hellew, LL Bean). There’s BIG money to be had, drawing people from their non-Maine lives toward “The Way Life Should Be”.

But the Maine I grew up in – as did most of my friends and acquaintances – was humble. Economical. Do-for-yourself. Fix instead of buy new. Nothing was disposable. You bought for quality and longevity. You made things yourself – homes built from the remains of barns and other homes, vehicles constructed from the remains of other vehicles, and food that you grew and harvested and canned and preserved and hunted and cured yourself. Work was taken in trade for goods, and vice-versa. If one guy did hauling for you one weekend, you helped him build his shed the next. Borrowed casserole dishes were never returned empty. The fruits of your garden were shared with your neighbors, and vice-versa. Weekends consisted of baked bean suppers held at the local grange, grabbing a couple of beers “down the Legion”, having lobster and steamed clam cookouts, or working at whatever household project was going on at the time. Or, just being a local tourist. I saw many a birthday pass at Range Pond and Reed State Park, plenty of summer evenings strolling along Pine Point or Old Orchard Beach, and people watching from various vantages in Freeport or in the Old Port district of Portland. Boothbay and Kennebunkport were short enough distances away from where I lived, and Bar Harbor, though further away, provided for great weekend trips.

Of course, if anybody got a strange craving for “the city”, it’s a mere two hours to Boston, and four to six to Quebec or Montreal or Ottawa, in Canada.

Mainers are a hardy bunch – well, they have to be, to survive the one convincing drawback of the area, and that’s winter. Mainers are fiercely independent, pragmatic, practical. Unbelievably loyal to their home town and home state. Wonderfully patriotic. Unwise of the ways of the world, but incredibly wise to the ways of life, if you understand the distinction. There’s a boggled bewilderment toward anyone who is from Maine who expresses the desire to move away, and an inherent suspicion (and pity) of anyone who is “from away”, that is either visiting or moves to their town. Though I will say that the latter are eventually forgiven for being “from away”, since they show the good sense to move to Maine.

Tourists are tolerated, barely, with the acknowledged fact that they bring much needed income to the state. Even people coming up from New Hampshire or Massachusetts are viewed with slight contempt – at the very least because of their “flatlander” status and perceived lack of driving skills. Anyone from any further away is accorded the status of an alien being.

Based on conversations with my sister, a red-hot conservative Republican, the somewhat puritanical and conservative nature of the state is being supplanted by the “damn liberals”, which I suspect is a good thing. Not that I want to change my cherished state in the least, but it can be at times rather intolerant. I hope that there are more folks like me, that have lived away for far too long and gained far too much experience and perspective, who want to move back and ease Maine’s way into broader avenues of thinking, but without taking away any of the wonderful qualities that make Maine what it is. It’s pretty darned isolated up there, so the conservatism is very firmly rooted in tradition which should certainly NEVER be done away with. I’m a firm believer in tradition. Just… gentled and leavened with a level of acceptance for other ways and cultures.

I’m botching this horribly and making you dear readers probably think that the entire state is comprised of torch burning prejudiced freaks, but that is most certainly not the case. Just think… small town atmosphere.

What I cherish the most about Maine are the general values held by the people – family, friendship, neighborliness, and a general all-around “decency” of behavior. The community really comes together in times of need… again, since winters are so hard, it’s natural that neighbors help one another out. Each time I’ve taken (dragged? nah…) Calvin there on vacation, he’s always quite vocally surprised at the general friendliness of the people. The lifestyle is simple, and the people are uncomplicated, but certainly not simple themselves. The pace is just so much slower there, and the values are placed not on acquisitions and wealth, but in the living of a good, clean, purpose-filled life.

The enthusiasm of the population is generally focused on all things natural – the harvest fairs, the farmer’s markets, the locally grown and locally manufactured, and the preservation and conservation of precious resources and the state’s natural attractions. When I recall just how MUCH there is in Maine to see and explore and do, I get rather bored with anything that city life has to offer. Can Arizona offer me wide sandy beaches filled with sand dollars just waiting to be collected? Is there a single nearby stream or lake that was NOT man-made in this Valley? Can one see blankets of stars overhead while standing in the middle of the state’s biggest “city”? Can I walk alone through the middle of that same city in the middle of the night and not fear for my safety?

I think not. There just seems to be not one ounce of clean, fresh, happy, calm, replenishing and enriching living to be had here in this desert. Now, I know winters are wonderful here – temperatures in the 70’s rather than feet of snow and all that jazz. But in my opinion the summers here are worse than any winter Maine has to dish out. There’s just something about being unrelentingly BAKED and BLINDED by the bright unfiltered sunlight that’s more depressing and difficult to me than having to bundle up and scrape ice off of my windshield. Summer in Arizona just makes me want to hide indoors, while winters in Maine at least offer skiing and snowmobiling and ice fishing and the like. You can always put more clothes on to get warm, I always say, but there’s just so many you can take off to get cool before you’re nekkid. And don’t even get me started on the lack of GREEN anything – the color of the plants that pass for trees here can’t even compare to the thick forests in Maine. There is no feast and delight for the senses in Arizona, is I guess what I’m trying to say. At least, none that satisfy me. Even the spots that are lovely – Sedona, and Flagstaff – seem to me to be poor substitutes of what I really want and where I really want to be.

And it’s just so damned busy. People are indifferent toward one another at best, harshly violent at worst. Crimes that happen here on such a frequent basis that they can’t even be all mentioned on the evening news happen wonderfully infrequently in Maine, if at all. The traffic is a mess (though not as bad as some states, as I understand it), everyone is in such a wound up state to get where they’re going that they forget to be where they are. It’s always onward, onward, onward. What’s next, what’s more, what’s better. There seems to be NOTHING original here – strip malls crop up with alarming frequency and speed, with the same combination of restaurants and services in each one, so that every corner looks like the one before it and the one after it.

While I know that there are people who are equally as passionate about Arizona as I am about Maine, and can offer counter-points for each point against it that I offer… well, this place is not what stirs my soul. That doesn’t make me wrong, it just makes me different.

Maine is not perfection. There’s crime, there’s indifference, there’s humanity for God’s sake. There’s the winters and the roads and the taxes and the slower economy and the encroaching “damn liberals”. Maine has as much its own share of crap and nonsense as every state in the U.S. and every location on the globe. There is no Eden this side of death. But it’s what’s perfect for ME. It’s quiet, it’s safe, it’s beautiful, it’s rural. It’s the feast and delight to my senses that I crave. It’s what calls to my soul. It’s what drives the running internal chant (sometimes out loud, even), from morning till night every day that I’m apart from it, “I want to go home home home”.

No matter where I happen to live on this planet, or for however long and far away from it that I must live, I will always be from Maine. We WILL live there again.

Someday. Please God, let it be soon.